Reaper tips n tricks #3 — Dual mono or stereo? Who cares….
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How many times have you happened to receive a separate dualmono Overheads (drums) instead of a single stereo take? If managing a take’s channels is stealing your time and resources, maybe this article will be useful.
Today we will see two custom actions that allow us to combine two mono files into one stereo and split one stereo into two mono.
Very useful for adapting the files received to our workflow, if we prefer to work with stereo or dual mono take from now on we can adapt the files sent by customers to our needs.
Let’s see how the two processes work:
Simple and effective, in a few seconds we have our new files and tracks renamed.
As always, to create these custom actions it is necessary to have installed the reaper SWS, link at the bottom of the article.
Let’s start with the custom action that brings together two mono files in a stereo, let’s see how it is composed:
The action is divided into 3 main parts:
- An action which, starting from the selected takes, selects the tracks
- An action that implodes takes and creams symmetrically
- A series of actions that renames tracks and deletes previous takes.
Now just assign the costum action to a shortcut (“ctrl + alt + 2” in my case) and that’s it.
Now let’s see the reverse process, splitting a stereo take into two mono.
I must premise that, due to the actions, the routing of the track in which the stereo take is present will be eliminated as the track itself.
Let’s see how this action is composed:
As you see we make the reverse process, we explode the take and delete the track which contain the original stereo take.
“Converting takes mono to stereo is not a problem … if you have an assistant that does it for you!” — Tchad Blake
I hope this third trick has been useful, if you have questions or have improved the custom action write it in the comments.
Teo
Useful links:
Reaper SWS: http://sws-extension.org/
Dual mono vs stereo: https://www.sweetwater.com/insync/what-is-dual-mono-versus-stereo/
